How well did 1984 hold up in 1985?

Cafe Society
21

I’m surprised this thread fell so flat, but so it goes.

I would have thought I have consumed any number of books/films which purport to take place “at some point in the not too distant future.” I thought it might be mildly enjoyable to discuss which got what right, but apparently not. Or I sidetracked it by getting everyone to focus on 1984.

Carry on however you wish. I’m personally not a fan of Orwell or 1984, so I won’t be participating in that. As I said, I chose that book only hoping for a catchy thread title.

22

Back to the Future Part II got enough things right about 2015 to fill out a 10-item listicle:

https://www.cbr.com/back-to-the-future-part-ii-got-right-future/

The list:
Camera drones
Voice-activated lights
Smart glasses
Mobile payment technology
Legacy sequels
Fingerprint technology
80s nostalgia
Holograms
Hands-free gaming
Video calling

23

I wrote a post about something not 1984, though I did also compare telescreens to Alexa.

OK, here’s another. Strange Days was set in 1999 but filmed only 5 years earlier. it has LA as a hellish war zone, and focused on technology that could read and record memories. It wasn’t even close to being accurate in anything, though I think it was a better film that its reputation would have you think.

Escape from New York, set in the far future of 1997. The fascist government could still come true, 27 years later, but not even in the best MAGAt wet dreams is Manhattan ever going to become a walled prison. The real estate is too valuable. And no way are several million people just going to roll over (“Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”). Escape from LA is even worse.

Freejack. I has to look up the dates. It was set in 2009. Our 2009 seems better, though the ability to call people based on their license plate might be a good thing to have.

Westworld! Filmed in 1973 and set in 1982-ish, it had near sentient AI and robots that were “fully functional”, as Data would later say, and sexually indistinguishable (I assume) from actual humans. Neither of which we are any closer to achieving 52 years later.

Terminator. Judgement Day was 1997. We’re still here, Skynet is not.

Barb Wire, the infamous nudie remake of Casablanca, filmed in 1996 and set in 2017 after the second American Civil War. That could still come true, but so far society is still managing to hold on.

I for one am glad the world didn’t turn into a dystopian post-apocalyptic hellhole. I assume the filmmakers are, too.

24

OTOH, the “hijacking an airplane and crashing it into lower Manhattan” part was only about four years off.

25

Tis true. But like in Independence Day, the Twin Towers survived.

26

amazon has a suitability chilling commercial for a new 1984 with one of the currently popular british actors doing the reading …you know the thing i never figured out was if they were actually at war with anyone…considering the tone of the book was almost everything was a lie

27

As I get older I wonder if anyone other than England is living under Big Brother. Maybe this is what average people in North Korea think the world is? They think the whole world is as bad as them, but no, it’s just you. When you control all the media, you can get people to believe anything.

28

The premise doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve read the novelization of the movie (based on a lot of backstory that didn’t survive the cutting room). A war (of which Plissken is a veteran) broke out between the USA and the Soviet Union/Russia. Neither side dared resort to nukes but nerve gas was used on a mass scale, including a gas attack on Manhattan. Millions died, more millions were left incurably insane from the gas which left Manhattan contaminated. The US government had to simply quarantine the entire island, which later was handy to use as a dump-and-leave-to-die open air prison.

29

OK that makes more sense. Explains the crazies that live in the sewers, too.

30

You can find some works that are extremely predictive just by excluding the things in it that are not. Like Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. He predicted that the first journey to the moon would involve a crew of three departing from Florida and taking 4 days to arrive and their return would be facilitated by a water landing. Alas, he also had the craft launched from a giant gun; subjecting his astronauts to 1000 Gs. And it takes place in the 1860s; not the 1960s.

31

Ditto for me, except that I was in 10th grade.

We also read Lord of the Flies that year. A rather dystopian reading list, looking back…on top of watching The Day After a few months earlier.

32

There was a movie made in 1936, Things to Come (based on H.G. Wells), which foresaw WWII, but after the war ended, manufacturing of stuff fell away and society became highly local, primitive and difficult. Then about 1970 there was a huge plague-like event. Some years after that, we had shiny spacecraft. It was all very strange to watch.

33

I like “The Machine Stops”. No specific date mentioned, though :slight_smile:

34

well, there was a passage where when he had the job in the Ministry of Truth he had to retouch a photo of party officials in New York City by taking someone who fell out of favor and was no longer recognized as being alive .out of the pic

Actually what is the most chilling prediction that’s 90% or so true? you can create a human being without another human being being involved

the ultimate goal of the party was to create a population of emotionless unthinking yes men

in fact that’s where George Lucas got the idea for the clones/stormtroopers in star wars

35

heres the commercial ive been seeing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBoJGgFYtyA

36

The screenplay was written by H.G. Wells himself. It has some extremely interesting stuff and some good lines, but it jumps all over the place and is pretty incoherent. It has that 1930s worshipful attitude towards aviators that is lost today (Read the chapter on such aviators in David McCullouch’s compendium Brave Companions to se what I mean).
There are some interesting machines – the futuristic tanks you see as the long war progresses (especially interesting since Wells himself suggested the idea of tanks in his story “The Land Ironclads”, only using pedrail wheels rather than caterpillar treads), the huge airships, the future city – and some good points made (in particular that war shortages eventually halt progress, after stimulating it initially), but , taken as a whole, it’s a mess. When they were making 20012, Arthur C. Clarke suggested that Kubrick watch the film. Afterwards, Kubrick told Clarke not to suggest any more films – he thought it was awful.

There is a good print with lots of extras on the Criterion Collection DVD. Ray Harryhausen oversaw the colorization of the film on another DVD (the colorized version looks very good). The “shiny spacecraft” is actually only the Space Gun at the end, which is used to shoot one happy couple into space against the wishes of a crowd of Luddites trying to tear down the futuristic machines. It’s a weird choice for Wells – he had his Martian invaders shot out to guns to Earth in War of the Worlds, but he had Cavor travel to the Moon in an anti-gravity sphere in First Men in the Moon. Verne, of course, had used a giant gun to shoot his moon travelers out of in From the Earth to the Moon, but I suspect even he realized that the acceleration would be fatal to any travelers, and only used the technique because he had no other way of propelling them into space. (Rockets weren’t yet under consideration even by proponents, and certainly weren’t in the public mind in the 1860s). But by the time Things to Come was made Goddard had already been working on his rockets, as had the German VfR, and FRitz Lang had already made Die Frau im Mond, using a rocket to go to the Moon. Wells should’ve known by then that space guns didn’t work.

37

Interesting bit of trivia regarding 1984 – in 1974 I read an article in Time magazine that pointed out that people at that time making predictions for ten years into the future were setting them in 1985, rather than 1984. Evidently they were avoiding mentioning the year 1984 as if it was cursed.

38

The movie The Shape of Things to Come was necessarily a highly condensed version of Wells’ book, presented as a future history, which was a very long almost polemical treatise on the death of capitalism and the rise of socialism. Essentially, the Great Depression segues into World War Two without a break, and the heavy use of chemical weapons along with the outbreak of a pandemic- natural or bioweapon is never known- collapses what little is left of civilization. Only the Dictatorship of the Air survives to recreate society along rational, scientific lines.

Yes, Wells really takes that tone unironically. Holy Crap! H.G. Wells was a totalitarian!

39

We are approaching August 4 and 5, 2026, the dates on which Ray Bradbury set his short story There Will Come Soft Rains. We can only hope that those days don’t closely follow a nuclear holocaust, as in the story.

The story features a ridiculously automated house managed to a fare-thee-well by precisely choreographed robots. We’ve certainly taken steps in that direction with smart appliances, AI, and Roombas, but baby steps only.

And yet, I don’t think Bradbury wanted us to take his “smart house” entirely seriously. The point was that it doesn’t do any good to get all the little technological things right, if you get the big ones (like not avoiding thermonuclear war) wrong.

40

Children of Men (film version) is set in 2027 and there’s a tongue in cheek fan theory that the rest of the world is living pretty normally and Britain is just Like That. Post-Brexit and post-13 years of Tory rule, it’s not exactly the most implausible view of 2027 Britain.